expo-upload-ios.md

expo upload:ios

In expo-cli@4, expo upload:ios has been moved to eas submit in the package eas-cli.

What you can use instead of expo upload:ios

• EAS Submit - this is the closest equivalent to expo upload:ios. By default it works best with eas build, but you can also use it with expo build:[ios|android]. This option is currently available to EAS Priority Plan subscribers, but will be part of the free tier when EAS Submit graduates from feature preview.
• Transporter.app - download this app to your macOS machine, open it, then run expo build:ios, download the resulting ipa file. Drag the ipa into Transporter.app to upload it to the App Store.

Why it was removed

The upload:ios command was implemented as follows:

• expo-cli packaged a library called traveling-fastlane - a standalone, cross-platform fastlane wrapper.
• fastlane is a Ruby library, and traveling-fastlane depends on traveling-ruby to provide a self-contained cross-platform Ruby executable. The Ruby version in traveling-ruby must be compatible with the fastlane version.
• expo-cli would download your app binary (using expo url:ipa) and then call into traveling-fastlane to invoke fastlane deliver with the appropriate parameters.

Traveling Ruby hasn't been updated for a long time and isn't something we can depend on to stay up to date with fastlane's Ruby version requirements. Ruby <= 2.3 stopped being supported as of fastlane 2.147.0, and that was the latest version of Ruby that shipped with Traveling Ruby.

In addition to this dependency situation, there were some significant limitations with the fastlane approach:

• fastlane deliver only works on macOS machines.
• It can fail if the developer's Xcode version out of date.

So, we built a replacement - EAS Submit. This is a hosted service that works on macOS, Windows, Linux, and any other platform where Node.js & eas-cli will run.